Entry hall 863 was a giant stone gallery carved like the throat of a huge beast, its walls of dark green dense green rock ribbed with massive reinforcement rings of cast sea-bronze.
Here, the gentle slope of the Terrace of the Scribes ended in a massive transverse choke-point—a granite portal thirty arm-lengths high. They were flanked by twin counter-weighted water gate chambers that once controlled the silt-dredging water chutes of the lower deeps. For seven thousand years, these bronze rings had absorbed the quiet ground-shaking settling of the land-wide shelf, green with the noble patina of ancient salt. But the quiet majesty of the Hadal vaults was now being wildly shattered by the advance of the Sovereign Conclave’s second echelon.
From the eastern lateral galleries, an ear-splitting loud noise of heavy-duty violence rolled into the main nave. It was the sound of fourteen heavy clockwork trench-dredgers, their massive three-sided treads tearing through ancient limestone stone railings with the mindless fury of iron locusts. Steam and chemical soot billowed from hundreds of brass exhaust pipes, filling the upper half of the vaulted gallery with a greasy, black smog that obscured the ceiling star-patterns. The air grew thick and foul, reeking of scorched coal, burnt sheep fat, and the acrid tang of strong etching acid.
